Anzsog Case Program

ANZSOG CASE PROGRAM Please cite this case as: Simons, Margaret. (2021). Political leadership and public service management in a crisis: Victoria’s second wave. Australia and New Zealand School of Government, John L. Alford Case Library: Canberra. Political leadership and public service management in a crisis: Victoria’s second wave An ANZSOG Teaching Case by Dr Margaret Simons Keywords: Coronavirus pandemic, ministerial responsibility, hotel quarantine, public health, Victoria, human rights, government outsourcing, national cabinet, emergency planning Original article access: Simons, Margaret. (2020). Coate inquiry reveals a dysfunctional Victorian public service, Inkl Original, December 23rd. Available via https://www.inkl.com/news/coate-inquiry-reveals-a-dysfunctional-victorian- public-service?section=combined Please note this case has a Teaching Note associated with it. To access a copy, please email [email protected] with a request and citing the title. Summary The state of Victoria’s response to the corona virus pandemic is now the most examined and investigated of any jurisdiction in Australia – and possibly in the world. This is not surprising. The nation’s response to the pandemic is internationally recognised as a success. Within this generally positive story, Victoria’s second wave – dating from early May until the end of October 2020 – was the most significant failure. The second wave was caused by “leaks” of the virus from a hastily implemented and poorly managed hotel quarantine system for returned travellers. This case study draws on three inquiries into aspects of the Victorian government’s handling of the second wave and asks what lessons can be learned. The inquiries found systemic failures by government, as well as problems with decision- making reflecting on ministerial responsibility. The case study identifies key decision-making points as well as both long and short-term issues of governance. These include the impact of emergency public health responses on human rights obligations; the consequences of government outsourcing of key services; the quality of emergency planning, particularly for pandemics and the implications of greater centralisation of policy; and decision-making, including This case was commissioned by ANZSOG for the John L. Alford Case Library. Views expressed in it are not necessarily those of ANZSOG. This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence, except for logos, trademarks, photographs and other content marked as supplied by third parties. No licence is given in relation to third party material. Version 08032019. Distributed by the Case Program, The Australia and New Zealand School of Government, www.anzsog.edu.au 2 through the establishment and operations of “National Cabinet”. Students are invited to reflect on these issues in the context of the core responsibilities of government in emergencies. Key points Australia is internationally recognised as a success story in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. Australia has been described by Time Magazine as having “knocked it out of the park” through an early and aggressive response driven by the science and coordinated between state and federal governments (Bremmer, 2021). By the end of 2020, community transmission in Australia had been effectively eliminated. Since then, there have been only a few quickly controlled outbreaks from the hotel quarantine of international travellers. By mid-March 2021, there had been 29,166 cases and 909 deaths out of a population of about 25.3 million (Department of Health, 2021). Within this overall success story, a second wave in the state of Victoria from May 2020 represents the biggest failure. Having virtually eliminated the virus by the end of April, the second wave peaked at 671 new cases in a day on 2 August, at which time there were 6,322 active cases. The second wave led to extended restrictions and eventually the declaration of a state of disaster, accompanied by a 112-day lockdown of the capital city, Melbourne, as well as shorter lockdowns in regional Victoria. Around 768 people died in the second wave (DHHS, 2021). In June 2020 it was established through genomic testing that 99 per cent of Victoria’s second wave of COVID-19 cases were transmitted from return travellers to workers in the hotel quarantine system where they were detained. From these workers, community transmission escalated rapidly, with the second wave overwhelming the state’s contact tracing system – the process of identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to disease to prevent onward transmission (Coate, 2020b; Parliament of Victoria, 2020). On the day the genomic testing was released, the Premier, Daniel Andrews, announced a judicial inquiry into the failures of hotel quarantine, and the associated government decision-making processes. A key issue was perceived to be the use of private security guards who were one of the main sources of transmission. Media reports suggested misbehaviour by these guards and lax and chaotic management – including sexual contact with detainees - might have caused the transmission (Whinnett & Johnston, 2020). The hotel quarantine inquiry later cleared the guards of blame, but found serious systemic issues in decision-making, leading to seriously poor management (Coate, 2020b). Early in the second wave, on 3 July 2020, nine public housing towers were identified as an emerging cluster and were subjected to a “hard lockdown”, imposed without warning, with residents prohibited from leaving their homes while as many residents as possible were tested for the virus. The lockdown lasted for five days (in the case of four of the towers) and 14 days in the case of a single tower in North Melbourne. In the aftermath of these events, there were three separate inquiries by different bodies into aspects of the Victorian Government’s management of COVID-19. All three inquiries identified systemic issues with the Victorian public service, particularly but not only the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), which included the Chief Health Officer (CHO) and a public health team under his control. It was the CHO who had the statutory power to impose lockdowns and quarantine detention. The Minister for Health, Jenny Mikakos and the Secretary of the Department, Kym Peake, both resigned before Coate’s final report. So, too, the Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Chris Eccles. All these resignations were prompted by aspects of the Coate inquiry. The three inquires: Systemic and resourcing issues The Hotel Quarantine Inquiry, led by Justice Jennifer Coate, released two reports – the first, in November 2020, contained recommendations on how hotel quarantine should be run in the future (Coate, 2020a). These recommendations have been largely though not entirely adopted by the Victorian government and other Australian jurisdictions. The second Coate report, released in December 2020, is the focus of the narrative below. It reported on an investigation into how mistakes had been made and the associated government decision-making and planning, including the decision to use private security firms and the manner in which hotel quarantine came to be established (Coate, 2020b). 3 The Victorian Ombudsman, Deborah Glass, launched an own-motion inquiry into the impact of the public housing lockdown from a human rights standpoint (Glass, 2020). Concurrently with these inquiries, a committee of the Victorian Parliament inquired into the state’s capacity for contact tracing, and the public health capacity more generally. It reported on 14 December 2020 (Legal and Social Issues Committee, 2020). Activity: Read the inquiry reports and access submissions and evidence at these links- • The Coate Inquiry: https://www.quarantineinquiry.vic.gov.au/ • The Ombudsman’s Inquiry: https://www.ombudsman.vic.gov.au/our-impact/investigation- reports/investigation-into-the-detention-and-treatment-of-public-housing-residents-arising-from-a- covid-19-hard-lockdown-in-july-2020/#executive-summary • The Parliamentary Inquiry: https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/lsic-lc/article/4574 Coate found both long- and short-term factors that lead to the failure of hotel quarantine. First, there was a lack of planning for quarantine in the case of a pandemic. Coate indicated that the fault here lay chiefly with the Federal government. A pandemic was not, or should not have been, a surprise, she said. There were Commonwealth pandemic plans and Victorian counterpart documents, but none anticipated the need for a mass program of mandatory quarantine, despite a 2009 review of the Commonwealth plan recommending that this be attended to. The lack of planning meant that Victoria had to build its program from scratch, with just 36 hours between a National Cabinet decision to compulsorily detain travellers and the arrival of the first detainees. Coate said: This placed incredible strain on the resources of the State and, more specifically, on those Departments and people required to give effect to the decision of the National Cabinet. This was a most unsatisfactory situation from which to develop such a complex and high-risk program (Coate 2020b, p.16). In this context, Coate found that decision making was faulty and ministerial responsibility was largely ignored which resulted in management issues on the ground that helped seed the second wave. This process is examined in more detail in the next section. Coate was also highly critical of a toxic culture within the DHHS which had led to the public health team being sidelined and not involved in key decisions. The Ombudsman, meanwhile, described the public housing lockdown as a “a very dark episode in our recent history,” (Eddie & Booker, 2020) in which the human rights of residents were not respected, and the government struggled to provide even the most basic of needs for locked down residents. While Glass found the hard lockdown was justified on public health grounds, she said the decision to impose it immediately and without warning had not been made on public health advice, but rather by Cabinet.

Load more